Wheeeee. Google updates PR numbers in the toolbar every few months, and another update is happening. The numbers on the toolbar don’t represent anything that Google uses for rankings in its algorithm, except in an abstract way. The hip thing to do if you’re an SEOer is just to ignore it. I have the Google toolbar installed on my browser, and I still look at the numbers. Here’s what I use the numbers for:

1. Get a general idea if Google’s spider sees a page or counts it for anything. In particular, I look out for the grey bar.
2. Get a general idea of whether a page has links or whether a page is linked to from other pages that have links.
3. Show clients that, indeed, I have gotten their site some new links, pointing out an increase in toolbar PageRank.

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When writing copy for your website, good calls to action matter. These are the links (or even navigation items) that steer your users toward what you want them to do. It’s important, though, to not lose sight of what your website’s users may actually want to do.

Just because you want your website’s users to buy something or fill out a form, it doesn’t mean that your users are ready to. You must recognize that users go through a process of gathering information first, and if you try to rush them to the end of the process, you risk clashing with their mental models.

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Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) no longer has a $0.10 minimum bid according to the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog. Minimum bids for keywords are based on quality and keyword value. Quality means they reward ads that get clicked on more relative to competitors with lower minimum bids. My experience with AdWords has been that this doesn’t matter a lick. Ads that get clicked on a lot are ranked higher and have low minimum bids but it doesn’t matter because you have advertisers lower than you for the keywords you’re bidding on. Then once you lower the bid to the minimum, the minimum starts going up again. This shouldn’t happen because the system is supposed to normalize for position, but from my experience, it does. I’m guessing Yahoo! will be the same.

The important factor is keyword value. AdWords made a lot of “long tail” terms more expensive by setting minimum bids higher – YSM might do the same. It might also affect some high traffic terms; the whole thing is sort of a mystery there. So for example, if I search “irs” on Yahoo!, I see more than 10 advertisers. On Google, I see one. This is probably because of minimum bids.

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It’s been a while since anyone talked about the size of Google’s index compared to its competitors. My guess would be that it dwarfs Yahoo! when it comes to meat and potatoes pages – non-duplicates, non-100%-template, non-ad-spam – but I don’t know where Google is at for certain. This is definitely one of the things that made Google better than its competitors earlier on though. This could probably spark a big long debate, and I really don’t think there is very much difference between Yahoo! and Google, so I don’t care to go into it. But Google continues to take the lead in finding what’s out there, now starting to spider web forms. Here is a whole new set of candidate web pages that Google will be scoring for search engine rankings that other search engines don’t even bother with. Pure Visibility just helped one client surface some of their pages, hidden behind a form, with Google sitemaps; in the future, these kinds of efforts will probably be unnecessary.

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Recent economic trends suggest that we’re about to enter in the worst recession in a generation. We all have friends who are hurting, even if we’re closer to Main Street than Wall Street.

In Search Engine Marketing Land, though, things still look pretty good. I was talking to a client today whose product is directly tied to housing starts, which are the lowest they’ve been in fifteen years. We both agreed the numbers were bad, but we also were surprised to find that overall the Paid Search campaign that we manage for him had not declined at all in the last three months; in fact traffic and conversions have continued to rise, with conversion rates holding steady. He clearly felt that Search Engine Marketing was a key component to keeping his company afloat during these tight times.

This isn’t an isolated trend. Without exception, Search Engine Marketing continues to grow for our clients. Why is it growing even as Americans are clearly cutting back?

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You have heard Pure Visibility beating the social media networking drum quite a bit lately, especially about Twitter and LinkedIn. But it’s only because we get excited about networking technologies that will ultimately help our clients expand their business.

When one of my colleagues first mentioned that I should join Twitter I was skeptical that it serve any purpose in my life. I have two kids and barely enough time in my life to watch TV let alone Twitter about it. Then it happened, over time (even though I rarely made tweets) I started to see the value in Twitter. I was able to see at a glance interesting things my friends were doing, which led to me actually talking to them about it the next day. I’d say something like, “Hey I saw on Twitter you and the family went to the Chelsea fair, I think I’ll take the kids there tonight.” Now I was connected with friends I only saw every month or so, I was a part of something bigger but on my terms. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Still I hear friends and clients not quite understanding why this Twitter phenomenon is sweeping the web. I can be a cheerleader (not a pretty sight by the way) and share heartfelt networking stories like mine, but Common Craft has video that explains exactly what I’m talking about. Take a peek and enjoy.

If you’re a Michigan resident, see how MLive.com uses Twitter to reach out and stay current with its audience. http://www.mlive.com/twitter

If you have a lead generation site, and you are actively engaged in search engine optimization and/or pay per click advertising, it’s a good idea to have a lead form. A lead form is simply an online form a visitor fills out if they want a quote, want to be contacted, or are interested in getting more information about your products or services. These forms can be tracked with analytics programs or with pay per click conversion tracking. Tracking can give you information about how much it’s costing you to generate a lead and where the leads are coming from – in particular, what search engine queries generate leads for your site. These forms are likely to generate at least a little bit of spam, and if you don’t have the proper safeguards, a lot a bit of spam. So it’s not all sunshine and roses with lead forms, but it’s typically worth the tracking information.

Besides tracking information, there’s other value to lead forms. A good lead form will have an open text field where visitors can make comments or talk about why they are contacting your company. The stuff a visitor enters in that spot is a valuable little piece of documentation. When I’m managing an account, I like seeing that information because:

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I just got teased today by the astute Bud Gibson of Michigan Innovators that there aren’t any obvious links to find Linda and I on Twitter from the Pure Visibility website. So here they are:

Catherine Juon: http://www.twitter.com/cjuon
Linda Girard: http://www.twitter.com/lgirard
And of course Bud’s group on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/innovators

And since the next logical question is “Why do you use Twitter?”, here goes…

Twitter, like LinkedIn (see my earlier post about Getting LinkedIn), has required effort + patience before anything interesting happened. People tend to give up when nothing happens right away. But you know what? This online stuff isn’t any different from real-world networking.

Have you ever gone to a group/association/networking event full of people you didn’t know and come home from the first one with a million dollar project? (If you have, I’d like to talk to you – email me at cjuon @ purevisibility.com)

Spending time with Twitter is much like going to a networking event.

• There are some people I know there (those are the ones I connected with first),
• some friends I invited to catch up with me there (like Catherine Buerkle in Germany – it has been a great way to feel like we’re not an ocean apart)
• and lots of new friends that I’ve made there because they know someone in one of the first two categories,
• and lots of new friends that found me because I said something that happened to resonate in some way – like talking about Detroit, or Michigan, or the Red Cross or Search Engine Optimization, etc.

And THIS is what I would argue makes Twitter cool. It’s not just that its 140 character limit creates short and digestible messages (tho that REALLY helps). It’s that it adds a whole new dimension to networking. Beyond the traditional way of finding someone through somebody who knows someone (such as in traditional networking or online communities like LinkedIn), you can randomly find people who share an interest in a common topic though tools that allow you to effectively “follow” words (vs. just people).

And for whatever reason, Twitter seems to be a community full of people that are open to this sort of serendipitous networking. People who generally enjoy reading each others stuff, and who seem to enjoy the role of being good samaritans. I could write a book full of examples, but here are a few:

• When my used but well-loved convertible got totaled while sitting in front of the house, I twittered my state of bummed-outedness and got immediate responses from people I barely know to cheer me up. (How cool is that?)
• When a Twitter friend was diagnosed with cancer, the world seemed to swell up around her and offer help in a way that has already been really well documented – just search for Frozen Pea Fund (long story, but you’ll find out why it’s so named eventually).
• When we were looking for websites designed in the Midwest for Create magazine and Twittered out a call for submissions, we got immediate answers… The list goes on.

And the best thing about Twitter is that I can network with my friends there without having to skip dinner with my family, and my friends are always there even if I’m stuck in an airport waiting for a flight. It’s networking when you have time for networking, instead of every third Wednesday night at 6 pm at yet-another-hotel.

Of course, I do both. But now that the kids are older and need help with homework after school it’s nice to have alternatives. Thanks, Twitter!

And now, a word from the Twitterati – why do you use Twitter?

Are you one of these go out and do it yourself types? Do you like challenges? Do you own a company that has a nice looking, goal-oriented website that serves a large geographic area and has competitively priced products or services? Are you able to edit that website? Do you like large piles of cash?

If you’re like me, you like figuring things out on your own and you like cash. If I had a website that sold products or services, the first thing I’d do is start a pay per click account. I probably wouldn’t read a blog post like this one and just dive right in. If you’re not exactly like me, but still like cash, and would like some pointers to start, well then here you go. Otherwise, here’s the AdWords signup page, click to begin . . . you’re welcome.

AdWords Strategy : Pointers to Start

1. Research Keyphrases.

You can use Google AdWords’ keyword tool, but it doesn’t provide many variations. Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery are better. Both tools offer free trials. Typically Keyword Discovery will show more keyword variations because it keeps a database over an entire year. Wordtracker however, does more work to come up with keyword variations with related terms.

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There are some SEO problems we see all the time. Websites that display text in images instead of html, using language that doesn’t match the way people talk about what the site’s about, vague words used for headings and link text. These are missed opportunities to tell search engine crawlers what a site is about. A lot of the really key parts of SEO aren’t secret; Google Webmaster Central is foremost among many sources for free tools and information that can help make a search engine friendly site.

But still, people code, design and write for websites in ways that really hurt their chances of getting good search engine rankings and the site traffic that those rankings can bring. The other day, I thought of paintings by Mark Rothko as a fine art example of a common SEO problem. Some of Rothko’s famous works include Untitled, No. 18, and of course, Untitled.

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